A Treaty By Any Other Name...   

In my line of work, radio news, it doesn't really matter how you refer to the North American Free Trade Agreement: It's "Naf-tuh." But in many newspapers and magazines, the treaty's abbreviation has undergone a remarkable metamorphosis – from N.A.F.T.A. to NAFTA to Nafta.

The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, both adamant supporters of the agreement, have embraced "Nafta." That arrangement gives the treaty a fait accompli legitimacy and the prestige afforded to proper nouns. To the uninitiated, the treaty appeared tangible, even before it was approved.

To drive the point home, let's visit Cousin GATT. No publication would refer to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade as "Gatt," largely because it's long been a tangled diplomatic mess. Better to leave it all caps.

Perhaps there is an unspoken (or unwritten) hierarchy behind all this. At its base lie unwieldy, grim-faced abbreviations with periods: S.A.T., L.A., U.N. and the now-defunct U.S.S.R., to cite a few.

Slightly more upscale is the friendlier, all-cap, no periods family. It contains the banal (QE2), the obsolete (NATO), the corporate (GTE), the explosive (TNT), the mysterious (UFO), the loosely-configured (OPEC), the best-forgotten (IOU), the contemporary (ASAP) and, in my case, the rival (NPR).

The pantheon is reserved for those former abbreviations now firmly established as dictionary words, or at least headed that way: radar, snafu and, of course, Nafta (or Nafta).

Is it with an eye to influencing public policy that the Times, the Journal and other linguistic trendsetters have elevated NAFTA to near-word status? U.B.D. judge.